Lewis Namier

"But most of all there is that marvellous microcosmos of English social and political life, that extraordinary club, the House of Commons. For centuries it has been the goal of English manhood, and besides those who found seats in it on the strength of a tradition or of a quasi-hereditary right, there were in every House many scores of men, for whom its membership set the crown (and often the coronet) on achievements and success in other walks of life. Generals, admirals, and pro-consuls entered it, business men who had made their fortunes and now aspired to social advancement, Civil Servants, lawyers and political wire-pullers who tried to raise their professional status, etc. The rise of "interests" and classes can be traced through the personnel of the House of Commons, the forms of English gregarious existence can be studied, the social structure of England is reflected in it, the presence or decay of independent political life in boroughs and counties can be watched in their representation."

"[O]n a careful inquiry it will be found that the coming in of American wheat has wrought a greater change in the composition of the British House of Commons than the first two Reform Acts."

"The historical development of England is based upon the fact that her frontiers against Europe are drawn by Nature, and cannot be the subject of dispute; that she is a unit sufficiently small for coherent government to have been established and maintained even under very primitive conditions; that since 1066 she has never suffered serious invasion; that no big modern armies have succeeded her feudal levies; and that her senior service is the navy, with which foreign trade is closely connected. In short, a great deal of what is peculiar in English history is due to the obvious fact that Great Britain is an island."

"The relations of groups of men to plots of land, of organised communities to units of territory, form the basic content of political history. The conflicting territorial claims of communities constitute the greater part of conscious international history; social stratifications and convulsions, primarily arising from the relationship of men to land, make the greater, not always fully conscious part of the domestic history of nations—and even under urban and industrial conditions ownership of land counts for more than is usually supposed. To every man, as to Brutus, the native land is his life-giving Mother, and the State raised upon the land his law-giving Father... There is some well-nigh mystic power in the ownership of space—for it is not the command of resources alone which makes the strength of the landowner, but that he had a place in the world which he can call his own, from which he can ward off strangers, and in which he himself is rooted—the superiority of a tree to a log. In land alone can there be real patrimony, and he who as freeman holds a share in his native land—the freeholder—is, and must be, a citizen."

"Whether the theory of an actual paternal origin of government is a correct phylogenetic or logical inference, or merely a psychological delusion, we shall probably never know; but this much is certain, that it is an assumption natural to us all. Correct perception of a psychological fact underlay Sir Robert Filmer's theory: all authority is to human beings paternal in character, for they are born, not free and independent as some of Filmer's opponents would have it, but subject to parental authority; in the first place, to that of their fathers."

"Before the war the manor-houses on the big landed estates were centres of high culture and mainstays of modern economic life in Eastern Europe. They resembled Roman villas in semi-barbaric lands. Their inhabitants read the works and thought the thoughts of the most advanced civilisation in the midst of an illiterate peasantry."

"For us Jews no sacrifice is too great for the sake of Palestine and of our National Home. Soil shall be created in Palestine where there is none at present, and trees shall be planted however many times Arab hooligans uproot them; and Haifa and Tel-Aviv shall grow into ports and cities equal to, or greater than, Alexandria."

"There is no-one alive engaged on history work with your experience of politics, government, and war. Please do not try to write history as other historians do, but do it in your own way. Tell us more how various transactions strike you, and what associations they evoke in your mind. When studying the detail of government at that distant period of almost 250 years ago, many comparisons must have occurred to you, which you seem to have suppressed. Too much history is written by don-bred dons with no knowledge or understanding of the practical problems of statecraft."

"Now the acid test will be applied to the friendship and devotion which various communities feel for the British Empire; and I am certain that no Jewry, free to speak and act, will fail in this test. As stated in your issue of to-day, Dr. Weizmann has declared at the Zionist Congress in Geneva that the Jews stand behind Great Britain and will fight on the side of the democracies."

"The League was to cure humanity and lead it into better ways. It was an expression of the morality and idealism of the Anglo-Saxons, and of their ignorance of what it means to suffer of neighbours and disputed borderlands (Ulster alone knows it)."

"If it is a question of policy, the rights and claims of non-Arabs in the Near East must not be swept away by a legerdemain into the wide Arab pocket. The historic connexion of the Jewish people with Palestine has received international acknowledgement, and so has the fact that they are in Palestine of right and not on sufferance. The Arabs now look forward to fuller realisation of their desire for union and independence; the Jews claim the right to establish a free Jewish commonwealth in Palestine. The blood of a million Jews murdered by the Nazis cries to heaven; the world-wide Jewish problem calls for a solution; it has its roots in Jewish homelessness: in Palestine, and through Palestine alone, can a solution be found. It should not be impossible to arrive at a settlement of the Near East which would satisfy the needs of both Arabs and Jews, and realise their national aspirations."

"[T]o millions of Jews, Palestine means much more than the solution of their individual problem—it stands for the oldest national and religious tradition known to the Western world. It is not within the power of men to make us renounce it."

"He writes about the decade before the war:—"Foreign policy ('rearmament') and social services ('the dole') were competitive claims on a straitened national output." Surely, with 2,000,000 unemployed the output could easily have been expanded to satisfy both claims. It was not; because we believed in "thrift" and transferred this conception derived from individual economy to that of the nation, in which it is apt to turn into sheer nonsense. Further, in the "thrifty" view of national economy production for export is a virtue, but for self-consumption it is, at the best, excusable. This led us into a second absurdity. If we produced material for armaments and exported them, say, to Germany (and they were financed by city loans on which the Germans duly defaulted) "classical economists" beamed with pleasure over our "roaring exports." But had anyone suggested using these materials for the rearmament of this country he would have been decried as a "spendthrift militarist.""

"States are not created or destroyed, and frontiers redrawn or obliterated, by argument and majority votes; nations are freed, united, or broken by blood and iron, and not by a generous application of liberty and tomato-sauce; violence is the instrument of national movements."

"For 20 years between the two wars the Germans have contended that the cutting off of East Prussia by the Polish Corridor created an utterly untenable situation, and they certainly did their best to make it so. But Poland cannot exist without access to the sea, and the behaviour of the Germans in Czechoslovakia (and elsewhere) has proved that no State can safely harbour them as a minority. Therefore their removal from East Prussia is the only solution. Lord Quickswood dwells on the cruelty of transfers of population; nothing can surpass in cruelty what the Germans have inflicted on humanity by this second world war. A third must be prevented. Lord Quickswood admits that "the great mass of the German people have doubtless a certain moral responsibility for the crimes of their rulers," but sees in it mainly sheep-headed stupidity. Millions of German soldiers and civilians have witnessed the unspeakable massacres and atrocities ordered by their rulers; had there been a normal human reaction these orders could not have been carried out. The German nation is corporatively responsible for what has happened."

"Churchill alone, month after month and year after year, exposed the growing dangers of the international situation, pleaded for a consistent and active European policy, and pressed for re-armament on an adequate scale."

"[T]he German scene was transformed by the entry of Hitler: never before had a man so malignant attained such power, nor a nation shown so little revulsion from evil. Crude and hysterical, full of virulent hatreds and envy, he powerfully appealed to the Germans, and set about doing their work in Europe... Hitler had shrewd skill, but no wisdom; with him there was no appealing to reason or even to rational interests—which men like Chamberlain were slow to grasp. Nor was there in him a conscious control of his own moves; hence he appeared incalculable and chaotic."

"The declaration of war on September 3, 1939, is one of the great turning points of history, and should be remembered in awe and gratitude. At the last moment Britain, though fully conscious of the mortal danger she was facing and of her own weakness, called a halt to a process which had gone much too far, and which, had Hitler pulled off his trick once more, would have subjected all Europe, and perhaps ultimately the world, to Nazi Germany."

"The official "Conservative" leaders of 1938–1939 were mostly ex- or semi-Liberals of middle-class Nonconformist extraction, whose Liberalism had gone rancid – anxious business men lacking imagination and understanding even in business, and in foreign politics lay preachers full of goodwill à bon marché."

"I have always maintained that British history in the eighteenth century is primarily a history of country houses."

"Sir Lewis is the principal mentor of the modern school of historiography in this country—a school that combines meticulous attention to the details of research with an acute grasp of what is significant in the interpretation of the past. Apart from the debt owed him by the many younger historians who have received their training at his hands, Sir Lewis is largely responsible for an important change in the British historical outlook: his volumes on the structure of eighteenth-century politics have revolutionized the traditional view of the relations between Crown, Administration and Parliament under the Georges."

"Namier had put a time bomb under the Englishman's conception of his history. (He described Trevelyan as "representative of all that is worthless in history".) The prince of bores, rude, arrogant, venerating Britain as the land of liberty that had been won by its aristocracy, Namier obsessed us even after his death. But there was another reason why Namier irritated us. Namier believed that politics was solely about power, and that ideas, religion, law were mere superstructure. We were suspicious of anyone who claimed to have discovered one infallible method of unravelling the past."

"Namier's most striking personal characteristics were an unremittingly active intellectual power, independence, lack of fear, and an unswerving devotion to his chosen field."

"[T]he greatest British historian to emerge on the academic scene since the First World War: Sir Lewis Namier. Namier was a true conservative – not a typical English conservative who when scratched turns out to be 75 per cent a liberal, but a conservative such as we have not seen among British historians for more than a hundred years... Like Acton's liberalism, Namier's conservatism derived both strength and profundity from being rooted in a continental background. Unlike Fisher or Toynbee, Namier had no roots in the nineteenth-century liberalism, and suffered from no nostalgic regrets for it... He worked in two chosen fields, and the choice of both was significant. In English history he went back to the last period in which the ruling class had been able to engage in the rational pursuit of position and power in an orderly and mainly static society. Somebody has accused Namier of taking mind out of history. It is not perhaps a very fortunate phrase, but one can see the point which the critic was trying to make. Politics at the accession of George III were still immune from the fanaticism of ideas, and of that passionate belief in progress, which was to break on the world with the French revolution and usher in the century of triumphant liberalism. No ideas, no revolution, no liberalism: Namier chose to give us a brilliant portrait of an age still safe – though not to remain safe for long – from all these dangers."

"Namier's choice of a second subject was equally significant. Namier by-passed the great modern revolutions, English, French and Russian...and elected to give us a penetrating study of the European revolutions of 1848 – a revolution that failed, a set-back all over Europe for the rising hopes of liberalism, a demonstration of the hollowness of ideas in face of armed force, of democrats when confronted with soldiers. The intrusion of ideas into the serious business of politics is futile and dangerous: Namier rubbed in the moral by calling this humiliating failure "the revolution of the intellectuals". Nor is our conclusion a matter of inference alone; for, though Namier wrote nothing systematic on the philosophy of history, he expressed himself in an essay published a few years ago with his usual clarity and incisiveness. "The less, therefore," he wrote, "man clogs the free play of his mind with political doctrine and dogma, the better for his thinking.""

"To some extent the interpretation of the story of parliamentary reform in this period has been modified since Veitch's day in consequence of the displacements in eighteenth-century historical studies arising out of the work of Sir Lewis Namier. Namier's studies have deepened our understanding of the way in which the old representative system, despite its illogical absurdities, had an effective functional role in a society in which politics was the virtually unchallenged preserve of a landed oligarchy. The continuance of such a system depended upon the maintenance of a stable and homogeneous society, homogeneous in the sense that people were for the most part conscious of the direct or not very direct connection of their fortunes with the "landed interest" and were, despite diversities of rank and fortune, on the whole satisfied with their niches in society."

"With the publication of Namier's two major works on British eighteenth-century history, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, and England in the Age of the American Revolution, the then accepted picture of the political world in the first half of George III's reign lay scattered in ruins. Schoolmasters, it has been said, hastily roped off the later eighteenth century and guided their charges through more simply charted periods. Nor was it they only who fled from chaos. Namier himself had provided only a few foundations and guidelines for the new historical reconstruction made necessary by the levelling of the old. At that time his intention of carrying his work further was immediately precluded by the non-availability of vital manuscript collections containing the papers of George Grenville, the Marquis of Rockingham and Edmund Burke."

"Eighteenth-century revisionists were puzzled to see Sir Lewis Namier, that fine though overrated historian, promoted to the status of bugbear by their seventeenth-century colleagues. Between Namier and the revisionists there are, perhaps, similarities of temperament; of scepticism about the autonomous force of ideas; of hostility to Whig sins of teleology and anachronism. Yet Namier was not, primarily, a narrative historian. His brief narratives, when he wrote them, were clever and highly selective sketches rather than detailed examinations. His relentlessly detailed researches were mainly in the structural analysis of the Commons, and were intended to dissolve Whig generalisations about the course of events at the centre by a series of constituency studies. One could argue that Everitt and Morrill more than Russell and Fletcher are Namier's heirs in the seventeenth century, Aydelotte and Davis rather than Cooke and Vincent in the nineteenth. It might be suggested that what Namier's critics really objected to is his caustic and exceedingly effective conservatism, not his historical method. Indeed, his legacy was divided: it did not descend intact."

"If Namierism is dying, it is because the psychological props to the theory of mass biography have dissolved: psychoanalysis no longer seems to us a viable means of insulating historical enquiries from materialist-reductionist claims. This, indeed, was Namierism's weak point: it damaged liberalism by a strategy which, in an English setting, actually promoted Marxist historiography. Namier's positivism, his deflationary desire to strip away psychological illusions and ideological rationalisations, led in the end to a materialist reductionism even in his own ascription of motives."

"Namier, as a careful student of the Newcastle Papers, seems to have realised that transitions were occurring in the 1750s which transformed the Whig v. Tory alignment of the early eighteenth century into the multi-factional pattern which characterised the 1760s... A possible charge against Namier is that despite this youthful insight he did not afterwards object when his pupils and colleagues suggested that a Namierite analysis in terms of factions applied to much larger areas of the eighteenth century than that which it was devised to fit."

"But my own greatest debt to the Duke was the discovery of Namier. Now here was a level of history the existence of which I had never previously suspected. I was absolutely enthralled by his use of the minutiae of personal case histories, and it seemed to me that he was a historian who was writing about real people, about human beings and not just about Heroes, great principles, ideas, and that sort of thing. I was delighted above all in his portrayal of the great Duke of Newcastle, for me the very quintessence of the anti-hero, a personage of delightfully unglorious proportions."

"English historians have in the main been "progressive"—whig, liberal, radical, socialist. The occasional conservative among them—an Oman or a Mariott—was clearly so devoid of a mind that he contributed nothing to the tradition, and the violence provoked by Namier owed much to the astonishment felt in conventional circles at the uncalled-for appearance of a historian with tory predilections who clearly outranked the liberals intellectually."

"Lewis Namier's classic model of mid-Hanoverian Westminster retains, for all its shortcomings, a good deal of saliency. Well-developed structures of popular politics existed, but they rarely exerted pressure on the elite, for whom what mainly mattered was procuring jobs for family, friends, and self, and whose behaviour was governed by considerations of pragmatism, habit, custom, and routine rather than by concern for society or commitments to principle."

"Sir Lewis Namier had the advantage of access to the personal correspondence of the principal figures. He was struck by the pettiness of Newcastle's preoccupations, and impressed by the sincerity of the King as revealed in his youthful letters. Since Namier wrote it has been impossible to believe that George III consciously sought to make his kingship absolute, or indeed that his constitutional ideas were anything but platitudinously conventional, truly those of a Revolution monarch. Yet Namier did not adequately recognise the extent to which the programme of a patriot king must give rise to legitimate concern about the new policies adopted. Nor was he altogether frank about the attitudes and language which prevailed at court during Bute's supremacy."

"Sir Lewis Namier's essay 'Why men went into Parliament?' remains a classic of historical sociology. It is also misleading. Men went into Parliament for all kinds of reasons, but what they did when they got there almost always had a bearing on their staying there."

"The Newcastle Papers in the British Museum have been called the rubbish-basket of the eighteenth century. With almost incredible industry and no inconsiderable acumen Mr. Namier has rescued from the dust-heap an immense number of details with regard to parliamentary representation in England in the period when Newcastle was First Lord of the Treasury."

"Among British historians there is agreement that the great man of the twentieth century is L. B. Namier (1886–1960), who probably ranks as second only to Maitland among the greatest of British straight-line professionals."

"The dominant figure in contemporary English historiography is (I need hardly say it) the Polish Jew Lewis Bernstein Namier. He was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, but, as a militant Zionist, he remained outside British intellectual society until the publication of his book The Structure of English Politics at the Accession of George III (1929) gave him almost at once a unique position of authority, and transformed him, to his own surprise perhaps, into the model for the younger generation of English historians. In substance Namier applied to English history continental sociological methods of examining the ruling class, and he added to this a special knowledge of the situation in modern and contemporary Central Europe – which he was to show even more clearly in subsequent essays and research. Yet in his extraordinary ability as a minute and rigorous researcher and in the simplicity of his guiding principles he satisfied his English readers steeped in a historiographic tradition that had been formed under the influence of the first German historicism. Namier has instigated the most complex collective undertaking of contemporary English historians, the history of the English Parliament: and his example has influenced historians as different as J. A. Neale [sic]...and A. J. P. Taylor... It is impossible to separate from Namier's work R. Syme's studies in Roman history (The Roman Revolution, 1939)... Namier has been criticised by H. Butterfield in an attempt to re-establish a religious perspective which is Methodist in origin (Christianity and History, 1949 etc.); but if the credit for the reawakening of interest in the history of historiography is due to Butterfield, his specific criticism of Namier's books has not found favour."

"It has been the greatest of Sir Lewis Namier's achievements to exhibit the personal and local nature of political issues and political power at this time—to show how few members of parliament were, in the first instance, there for the purpose of taking a stand on political questions. They were there in their own right for their own purposes, or as the relations or nominees of other people who held political power in their own right and for their own purposes. The political questions of the day were important to many of them—and to more and more of them as the reign went on; yet they did not, for the most part, enter parliament beforehand, nor did their electors send them there beforehand, in order to determine these questions. This interpretation of British politics in terms of local or personal connexions and family prestige, first rendered popular by Sir Lewis Namier, has lately been confirmed by Professor Neale's discovery of very similar conditions in the reign of Elizabeth; indeed, the same method can be applied to any society which is, in form or in substance, an oligarchy."

"Namier was blessed, or cursed, by an enormous weight of temperament."

"He will remain a cult hero of conservative historians, and that means the bulk of the historical profession. His animus towards altruism, his cynicism towards human motivation, his reverence for inherited status, his belief in the authority of possessions, his near-idolatory for the English landed classes and for parliamentary monarchy will ensure a respectful and laudatory public within the establishment."

"Early publications, like his [J. H. Plumb's] study of the size of the electorate in the reign of Queen Anne, used Namierism against Namier for, based on solid archival ground, they painted a picture of a fiercely embattled and ideologically contentious polity. As more research piled up, the generalisations Namier had felt able to extrapolate about the "long" 18th century, from his study of its middle decades, now seemed valid for those decades alone."

"Namier himself treated it as virtually an axiom about all political behaviour that the actors engage in it solely out of a desire to acquire and exercise political power. It follows that their professed principles, or rather their "party names and cant", as Namier characteristically preferred to put it in The Structure of Politics, form no guide at all to the "underlying realities" of politics. They are invoked merely to ensure that the "unconscious promptings" and "inscrutable components" of personal ambition and the quest for domination which actually drive men into politics are "invested ex post facto with the appearance of logic and rationality". It follows that all such "abstract ideals" must be mere epiphenomena, which play no independent role in determining any courses of political action, and which not only can but ought to be bypassed if we are to give realistic explanations of political behaviour. As Namier himself put it in his essay on "Human Nature in Politics", "what matters most is the underlying emotions, the music, to which ideas are a mere libretto, often of very inferior quality". And, as several recent commentators on his work have stressed, it was his express hope in studying eighteenth-century politics (and a large part of the attraction which the subject held for him) to be able to show that "considerations of principle or even of policy had only limited relevance" in this period, that "what mattered in politics" at this time "was not attachment to principle but the struggle for office", and in general that "political ideas" are "rarely in themselves the determinants of human action"."

"It was Namier's greatest service to English history that he described with sympathy and vast knowledge, the system of patronage and its place in the work of government at the moment of its fullest articulation before the rise of parties and principles forever destroyed it."

"And of course Lewis, as I soon came to call him, was an intolerable bore unless you were fascinated by the subjects he talked about. To enjoy Lewis's company you had to believe that the eighteenth-century Duke of Newcastle, Zionism, the European revolutions of 1848, the national tangles of the Habsburg Monarchy and later the loathsome character of the Nazis were the most important topics of the world. I was ready enough to believe this. Others were not... Lewis, too, became easily bored himself. I have never known anyone who worked so intensely on a subject and then wearied of it. He never had the patience to write a real book and all his books are really collections of essays, lightly strung together."

"At Manchester I loved Lewis without reserve. There was in Lewis, as in Max Beaverbrook, a strange mixture of greatness and helplessness. Both of them were much greater men than I was, but at the same time I wanted to protect them and to give them affection. Lewis was unquestionably a great historian, the only one I have known intimately. Talking to him was an inspiration, always bringing out the best in me and giving me confidence. He seemed to possess a powerful aggressive personality and this is how most people saw him. Underneath he was insecure without any firm anchorage in life."

"Even over George III we disagreed. I thought party principles still counted and once described Lewis as "the man who took the mind out of history". This was only another way of saying that he was a Tory Marxist. I was neither. Of course I admired his style. But mine was quite different except perhaps for always seeking a strong first sentence. I worked hard to make my style simple from the moment I began to write. Lewis was more oracular. Our methods, too, were different. I often relied on intuition; Lewis believed in laborious research."

"There is a touch of something unique in Mr. Namier, a new method of tasting the intellectual pleasures of history. There are so many different ways in which things happen, or can be truly described as happening. Gibbon's is one, Carlyle's another, Macaulay's a third. Each is true, yet taken by itself each is false, for no one of them is the whole truth. In Mr. Namier's narrative things "happen" in yet another new way – the Namier way. And it is one of the truths... Mr. Namier is a new factor in the historical world."

"Two books by Sir Lewis Namier, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (2 vols., 1929; rev. ed. 1957) and England in the Age of the American Revolution (1930), challenged the basis upon which Lecky and those who followed him had written of the reign. Once these two books had appeared it was impossible to write usefully on the political history of the reign without taking account of this brilliant scholarly achievement."

"Since the present Bibliography was first written very important additions have been made to our knowledge of this period and that which follows it by English and American historians who have acknowledged the leadership of Sir Lewis Namier and so far taken his methods as their example that they are commonly spoken of as the Namier school. The movement began in 1929 with the publication of his two-volume work The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III. This was a work of rare originality and critical power, in which he transformed the accepted views of electoral practices and parliamentary life by exploiting all the available materials especially from a biographical point of view."